How outrageous is it? Mr Willoughby is a trustafarian who woos Marianne Dashwood with the gift of an Alfa Romeo Series 4 Spider, rather than a horse.

Any more modern madness? When Margaret leaves the Dashwood family home, she takes her "iPod, her childhood Nintendo DS and her pocketbook laptop".

Talk about product placement. What does Trollope say in her defence? "People feel more possessive about Jane Austen than they do about any other writer," she told the Cheltenham literary festival. "You don't have Thackeray-ites or Dickens-ites, but you do have Janeites."

What do Janeites look like? "I've been to one of their conventions," says Trollope, "which was held in Winchester, and most of the delegates from America – none of whom was exactly anorexic – were all in Jane Austen clothes."

Rude. What was her advice to Janeites about her new book? "Don't put yourself through the misery. If you are reverent about every single comma, don't do it to yourself. Just stick to the canon."

Suchet clasped a coin between his buttock cheeks to perfect Poirot's 'rapid, mincing gait', the actor has revealed, as he is about to appear in his final ITV adaptation of the Agatha Christie murder mysteries